Bridges in Singapore
As an island state with a river running through it, Singapore has a lot of bridges, some old, some new and some inside shopping malls.
Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Bridges
Author: Taswegian1957
Born in England in 1957 my family came to Australia in 1966. I grew up in Adelaide, South Australia, where I met and married my husband David. We came together over a mutual love of trains. Both of us worked for the railways for many years, his job was with Australian National Railways, while I spent 12 years working for the STA, later TransAdelaide the Adelaide city transit system. After leaving that job I worked in hospitality until 2008.
We moved to Tasmania in 2002 to live in the beautiful Huon Valley. David passed away in 2015 and I'm here on my own now but I have Cindy the dog and Polly the cat to keep me company.
I currently co-write two Wordpress blogswith my sister Naomi. Our doll blog "Dolls, Dolls, Dolls", and a "Our Other Blog" which is about everything else but with a focus on photographs and places in Tasmania.
Lest We Forget
Normandy Veteran
Veterans at the ANZAC parade 2015
Veterans
Lest we forget
Vietnam Veterans
The Hobart Cenotaph
Today is ANZAC Day. I didn’t get up early to go to the dawn service or catch the bus to see the parade in Hobart but the above are some photos that I took of the 2015 march.
I don’t think of the march as a celebration of war so much as a day that we remember the fallen.
Years ago when I used to go Dawn Service and to see the march in Adelaide regularly I used to enjoy seeing the pleasure the veterans got out of seeing old friends that maybe they didn’t see very often and their determination to go the distance even though they were old and maybe disabled.
It was once felt that the ANZAC tradition would die once the men and women who served in the world wars were gone but instead it seems to have become bigger. Of course, we’re never going to run out of conflicts to lose soldiers in.
The Waler horse is the type of horse used by the Light Horsemen
Riders forming up before the start.
Two of the horses in the riding demonstration.
A riding demonstration in WWI uniform.
I just hope that young people are commemorating the day for the right reasons. Many young Australians like to visit Turkey and spend ANZAC Day at Gallipoli but it was not meant to be about rock concerts and selfies. It’s a time to be solemn, reflect and do our best to make sure that no more young men have to die in a war.
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RDP: Book
Book
Although I have a Kindle now which I find very handy when I travel or for reading in bed I still own a lot of books. I like all kinds of books, some science fiction, detective stories, biographies, history and even some of the genre known as chick lit. I also have a small collection of doll books. Although I do a lot of my researching online those books are very handy to quickly look something up and I enjoy the illustrations a lot more in a book.
When David and I lived in South Australia there was a big second-hand book sale two or three times a year at the Dom Polski Hall in Adelaide and we always went, the proprietors got to know us by name over the years. When we first visited in the late seventies or early eighties, the cheapest books were fifty cents each. We were very hard up at the time so it was great to spend five dollars and come away with a big pile of new reading material. In later years I mostly spent a little more to buy nice hardcover books. I can still remember how we would browse the many tables of books for a couple of hours. I don’t think we ever left empty-handed.
However, these days lots of people seem to be ditching their books because they are downsizing. We get lots of them donated to the Op Shop and keeping the bookroom in some kind of order has become one of my pet projects. It’s a small room and there is never enough room for all the books. We do have our regular customers amongst the locals and we sell quite a few books to holidaymakers too. They often come in for books, jigsaw puzzles and board games to pass the time with.
There are other ways to dispose of unwanted books too. At the Botanical Gardens in Hobart, there is an area called The Burrow. It’s a small room with shelves of donated books which are available for visitors to the gardens to read and even take home if they wish. People often drop donations of books and magazines there too.
There is also the Little Free Library Organisation.
According to their website, they are the largest free book sharing network in the world. There are a couple of registered libraries in Tasmania and I suspect there may be a few unofficial ones as well. I am pretty sure I’ve seen one in Geeveston although I’ve never used it.
Some people use books to create art too. At Maker’s On Church Street in Geeveston, you can buy paper flowers and other items made from the pages of old books.
I still enjoy browsing in secondhand book shops and there are a couple of good ones in Hobart. The one pictured is my favourite kind, cluttered and you never know what you will find.
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Share Your World: 22 April 2019
Sharing My World This Week
My photos this week also answer these questions
- Featured image of dolls and Cindy and Polly for question 1
- The red rose for questions 2,4,5 &7
- A roast dinner cooking in the oven for question 3
- My apple tree for questions 4,6 &8
- Was the last thing you read digital or print?
I have a couple of e-books on the go. I was reading “The Last Librarian” back in January but it was rather a depressing book so I put it aside during the bushfires and haven’t gone back to it yet. I read a very funny travel book and then started another e-book which also turned out to be rather serious so I put it on hold too. Recently I’ve only been reading blog posts and news articles. The last thing I read before this was a post from Mrs Angloswiss for a word prompt.
- Are you more an extrovert or introvert?
I am most definitely an introvert and I did not need the Myers Briggs test to tell me that although it did tell me what kind of an introvert I am, or at least what kind I was in the 1990’s when I had to do the test as part of a work training program.
- How is your life different from what you imagined as a younger person?
I can honestly say that I did not imagine this part of my life at all. The future was shadowy. I didn’t imagine being a widow or having aches and pains. I didn’t start to think much about old age and what it would be like until David died. Apart from that, I guess my life is much like I thought it would be as I always knew that dreaming of lottery wins, world travel and big houses was an entertaining fantasy, not real life.
4. Do you think about dying? Does death scare you? Why or why not?
Yes, I do think about dying. We all die and realistically I’m nearer the end than the beginning of my life. Yes, it does scare me a bit. I don’t want to die in a hospital like David did. Perhaps I’m more afraid of the being ill and helpless part than the actual dying, although I hope it won’t hurt. I do wonder what comes after death as I’m not sure if I believe in heaven and hell. Not reincarnation I hope because I don’t know if I want to go round again.
The apple tree October 2018
apple blossoms on our tree.
Apples on my tree
Additional Gratitude Bonus Question: Who has been the kindest to you in your life?
I don’t measure how kind one person has been to me against another. I’ve been very fortunate to have always been surrounded by kindness. I have had it from (some) family members and many friends, especially in the past few years.
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1337 Again
Back in 2015 when I was still a relative newbie blogger I received a notification from WordPress for having received 1337 likes.
At the time I had no idea what the significance of such a random number was so I posted about it. My friend and fellow blogger Dennis was quick to explain that there is an internet language known as “leetspeak” and that 1337 refers to the word “leet”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet
Leetspeak goes right back to hacker communities using bulletin boards in the 1980s and is well known amongst gamers too. I am not familiar with the TV series “Mr. Robot” but apparently this show used Leetspeak to name each episode.
https://www.lifewire.com/what-is-1337-leet-4089946
Today 1337 popped up again. This time 1337 posts. The WordPress developers are still enjoying their little in-joke but now I’ve been around long enough that I’m in on it too.
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Easter Baking
Naomi is coming over this weekend, we haven’t managed to get together for a few weeks. She asked me if I would make some hot cross buns and maybe some fruit cake.
I haven’t made hot cross buns for a few years, last year we were away and the year before I think we couldn’t get together or maybe I just didn’t have the time. I’m never entirely happy with my hot cross buns. I never seem to be able to get yeast to rise the way I would like. I’m a traditionalist about hot cross buns. I don’t want them chocolate flavoured, or with chocolate chips or worse with no fruit. You can buy hot cross buns in the supermarket more or less from Boxing Day which annoys the heck out of me. I wouldn’t eat mince pies all year round even though I adore them and I consider that hot cross buns should only be eaten at Easter. The rest of the year they could be sold as yeasty fruit buns with no crosses. I don’t know why they just don’t do that.
I have a few recipes but as I was not sure if I had enough plain flour I decided to look online to see if there was a recipe that would work with self-raising flour. I found a couple on an American website and learned that if you use self-raising flour you don’t need yeast or salt. In the end, I decided that I had enough plain flour and I’d just bought yeast so I went to an Australian site and picked a recipe from that.
The recipes included the instructions for making the baked on crosses with flour and water and to my surprise, several people who commented on the US site were quite suspicious of this idea and thought it would taste awful. Most of the Australian and British recipes put this as a matter of course unless the crosses are to be iced on later. Some readers were going to make their baked on crosses with sugar instead. I don’t know how that would have worked out.
Now me, I don’t do either as I have a lot of trouble with piping anything. I just can’t get the hang of it. What I do is to use pastry and stick them on. Well, I used frozen pastry but I didn’t want to thaw out a whole packet of it just for that so I planned to make sausage rolls as well and do the crosses with the leftover pastry. My sausage rolls are nothing fancy. I just mixed my sausage meat with a little chutney for some extra flavour.
My first batch of buns made on Wednesday, I wasn’t too happy with. I left them in the oven a bit too long and while they were not burnt they were not quite right so I made another batch today which I thought looked better. They are very fruity because I always put more fruit than required in any recipe that involves it.
Here is the recipe I used. There are many variations on this of course. I have a similar one in my Margaret Fulton Cookbook but decided to use this one as I had raisins and peel I wanted to use up. I may have thrown some currants in there as well. Surprisingly for me, they came out looking not unlike the ones in the recipe.
http://allrecipes.com.au/recipe/27816/hot-cross-buns-for-easter.aspx
It’s a long way to the shop if you want a sausage roll.
Here are the sausage rolls, some of them will be eaten tomorrow no doubt.
As long as I had the oven on I thought I might as well pop in a batch of cupcakes. Naomi likes Red Velvet Cake and as I didn’t think I’d get time to make one from scratch I bought a packet mix.
My fruitcake was also a bit of an experiment. Mum used to make a fruit cake that I really liked and I knew she put cold tea in it instead of water to mix. I can’t recall where the recipe came from so I just looked online to find something similar. One was quite complicated and I knew mum’s recipe was very simple so I found another which basically just called for soaking the fruit in a cup of black tea until it cooled. I did a practice run earlier in the week and as with the buns left it in the oven just a bit too long although it was still edible. When I came to make it again yesterday I found I had run out of brown sugar. As going to the shops would have taken too long, I just used some baking sweetener I had on hand. I adjusted the cooking time a bit, longer than the recipe said but not as long as I’d left it the other day. I think that it came out quite well.
I got both the fruit cake and hot cross bun recipes from Allrecipes.com.au
At the moment the site is not letting members save recipes so I had to search again to find them, lucky I printed mine out. There are a few variations of the fruit cake. This one is called Mixed Fruit Barm Brack, the others, which are mostly Irish and Welsh recipes, involve soaking the fruit overnight. I knew mum never did that so thought this one was more true to what she would have made.
http://allrecipes.com.au/recipe/358/mixed-fruit-barm-brack.aspx
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Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Signs
Signs of the Times
My photos this week were taken with my phone while I was out and about in Geeveston. As I’ve explained before I don’t like to take my camera with me to the Op Shop. I’m afraid that it will end up buried under a pile of stuff never to be seen again. I don’t enjoy using the phone that much but it does take a reasonable photo.
